So why are pharmacists protesting? I found out from some of the locals at the Free Market Road Show that this is a heavily regulated and protected sector of the Greek economy.

The government has rules, for instance, that products such as aspirin and other painkillers can only be purchased at pharmacies. The bureaucracy also rigs all the prices to preclude competition. And there are even government policies that make it very difficult for new pharmacies to compete against the established firms.

When special interests have that much power, no wonder Greece is in trouble.

Thought there are some sectors of the business community, such as online entrepreneurs, that are treated like crap. Literally.

Here’s another example from a Wall Street Journalreport, albeit one where a modest bit of progress has been achieved.

For the first time in more than a hundred years, Greece is sacking public servants. In 1911, Greece introduced jobs for life under Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos. Now, a century later, his descendant, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s minister for administrative reform, is faced with the delicate task of slimming down the massive public sector this law helped create. …In exchange for…aid, Greece has promised to cut the government workforce by at least 150,000 by 2015 through attrition, and to lay off an additional 15,000 outright by the end of this year. Another 25,000 would be placed in the temporary labor pool. Of those goals, the first has been reached: Greece had 713,000 government workers at the end of 2012, down 122,000 from the end of 2010. …But the labor pool is still a work in progress. Last July, the first 4,000 employees were put in that pool, while another 8,000 or so followed a few months later. Few of them are expected to be rehired. And with Greece’s unemployment rate already close to 30%, few expect to find jobs in the private sector.

I actually feel a bit sorry for some of these people.

They probably took jobs in the bureaucracy without ever thinking about who was paying their salaries and without giving any thought to the featherbedding and waste that accompany most public sector positions.

In any event, they’re understandably worried now that the gravy train is being derailed.

Or maybe the gravy is still there, but in different forms.

It appears that there’s still taxpayer money floating around that can be wasted in interesting ways.

Here are some excerpts from the Guardian about EU-funded “anger management” for some of Greece’s senior tax bureaucrats.

Until Greece’s economic meltdown, anger management was an alien concept at the country’s finance ministry. …Today these are the buzzwords flying around the ground-floor training room at 1 Handris Street. For tax inspectors attending mandatory seminars at the government building, anger management, like patience and politesse, are now seen as essential prerequisites of an increasingly stressful job. “Today, in Greece, everyone is either unhappy or angry when they have to go and pay at the tax office,” Fotis Kourmouris, a senior official at the finance ministry’s public revenues department said. “There is a lot of negative emotion … in the framework of better customer service, classes in psychological and emotional intelligence had become necessary.”

…inspectors have found themselves at the sharp end of popular rage. In recent months visiting auditors have been chased out of remote villages, hounded out of towns and booted off islands by an increasingly desperate populace. “We’ve had multiple cases of violence at tax offices by angry members of public, including physical assaults; shots were fired in one case, and one attacker came with an axe,” said Trifonas Alexiadis, vice-chairman of the national association of employees at state financial services.

But when you read how the Greek government is trying to rape and pillage taxpayers, you can understand the anger.

A series of new tax laws has further fuelled public anger. Since the outbreak of the crisis, close to 30 new levies have been introduced by governments desperate to augment empty state coffers. “Too much pressure is being put on people who can’t pay,” said Alexiadis, who suggested that in such circumstances the classes were not only ill-conceived but “juvenile and unnecessary”. …accountant Heracles Galanakopoulos agreed. “They produce a law that nobody understands and then produce another three to explain it. By the time people get here they are really very angry,” he lamented… “I spend at least five or six hours a day reading up on all these new laws and still can’t keep up. Anger management is a nice idea but in a system that is so absurd it’s not going to make a jot of difference.”

Reblogged this on Neverending1's Blog and commented:
I’m re-blogging this because I like what he wrote. It has nothing to do with gang stalking. And you have to see the link to Berlusconi’s map of Europe(funny!). Its a little smutty, but funny.

Enjoy Greece….I was there in December on a cruise….Athens and Olympia….you can see the depressed nature of the place by the garbage along the streets and graffiti on the walls..oh well, people in a democracy deserve the government they get. How long are you there for may I ask?

Greece is the quintessential pitchfork democracy. That is it’s most distinctive feature. It is the land of “yes we can”. We can vote and impose anything on anyone.

But it is easy for people who look at Greece for the first time to exclaim “it is such a mess that I never envision that happening here in my own western democracy, we will sure pull back and turn around way before we become Greece”.
But there is a vicious cycle. And that vicious cycle starts much-much before than what you see in Greece today.
It is the vicious cycle whereby the more economic performance declines, the more voters see the state as one of the ever fewer remaining hopes. What you see in Greece is the result of many inevitable iterations of this vicious cycle. That vicious cycle has consumed all productivity, real and potential, including the enormous geographical endowment Greeks are lucky to be born in.

Greece will never recover in a meaningful way, although the intense part of the crisis will eventually bottom out. Its tourist industry will recover (has actually been doing rather well throughout the crisis) at which point the majority who is not in the tourism industry will figure out that that’s where the money is and start voting its wealth their way at the polls. The Mykonos Hospital, the Santorini public music hall, the Naxos stadium and so on…

There is though one excuse I will grant the Greeks. Nice beaches do skew the Laffer Curve towards the vertical axis. In dreary flat Denmark you have much fewer options. Hence as an inhabitant of Denmark, you are willing to tolerate a much bigger percentage of your labor been harvested by your neighbors, and still work. If I were an economics wonk and had a Ph.D student I’d suggest he/she investigate how the shape of the Laffer Curve (and the much more decisive to prosperity Rahn Curve) changes with geographical latitude.

P.S. Did you know that Greece’s first socialist president in ’81 ran his election campaign under the main motto: “Change?” Coincidence? Or is Greece indeed ahead of most western democracies in more ways than one?

Greece is the canary in the coal mine… the erosion of social capital there will take generations to replace… whenever elements of a society are willing to infect themselves with a.i.d.s. in order to collect social welfare benefits… the world in which we live has been turned on it’s ear… it is equal to eating next years seed stocks in order to survive the winter… and having nothing to plant in the spring… it is a kind if insanity… and it is destroying parts of Europe… and it has infected the leadership and peoples of America as well… the more statism and socialist thought we condone and accept… the more likely this dangerous world in which we live will provide us with challenges we can not overcome… ego… bombast… and disinformation will not change physical and economic realities…

A youngster goes to prison for holding five grams of pot but not for holding a six pack of intoxicating beer

The majority of prisoners are there for non-violent crimes

58M get Social Securityâ8.1M are on SS disability

400 have more wealth than 90%

What can the public do?

Increase Minimum Wage to $10.10â50% tax on income over 1m and 70% om top one tenth of one percentâEstate Tax âRepeal Bush Tax CutâRepeal Obama Payroll Tax-Tariff tax on products made by overseas American plants